This is actually more than just a platitude. The Premier is passing new rules that force all Ontario schools to agree to support "gay straight alliance" groups if students want to start them up. This has many religious people up in arms, because they say that it infringes on their rights.
Liberals have been tap-dancing around this issue, but the overwhelming fact of the matter is that this really does infringe on people's religious rights. If you look at a lot of religious groups, they do teach that we should hate gays and lesbians. Indeed, there are individual quotes in the Bible that suggest we should kill them.
"If a man lies with a male as with a women, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their lives." (Leviticus 20:13 NAB)
Of course, it also says in the same place that we should kill anyone who hits or curses their father, commits adultery, atheists, people who believe in other religions, etc. But the main thing is that the current, oral tradition of very large religious congregations teaches that we should ostracize, bully and abuse homosexuals and lesbians.
Is it any wonder that naive children act on these teachings of the church?
The question is, therefore, whether or not politicians should be going after church teachings and outlawing the ones that are causing real suffering to children?
This is not a straight forward question. Enlightened politicians, like the Premier, have an obligation to avoid letting the baser elements of society whip the public into a frenzy of hate. It isn't enough to be right, it's important to do the most you can to avoid harm. This means that when a politico is faced by an evil, manipulative scumbag that just might be able to mobilize the public if they throw around enough lies, falsehoods and innuendos,
they should be willing to consider bending a little in order to avoid a greater catastrophe.
The problem is, however, that if we pander too much to the religious bigots in order to deflate their attempts to mobilize the public, we run the risk of letting said bigots win half a loaf through just threatening to go for the whole one. And that in turn, raises the issue of whether the forces of darkness can eventually take over by forcing one compromise after another compromise out of the other side.
There are a lot issues raised by this 'cultural warfare', but two come to my mind which I think are both very important and very rarely raised.
The first one is the way liberals almost invariably let the bigots wrap themselves in the mantle of "morality". I personally don't think that it is moral to preach hatred and intolerance towards people because of their sexual orientation. I don't think hatred of any form is moral. I also think that it is very important to understand people who are different, even if we do not approve. I also believe that if people who are intolerant did try to understand the people that they don't approve of, they might find that their intolerance is totally unjustified. It may not be true that "to know all is to forgive all", but I do believe that "to know all is to forgive a great more than you would have before".
Not only do I think that intolerance is immoral, I also think that will-full ignorance is too. Indeed, I think that there is a great deal of will-full ignorance in our society. People who refuse to really look into important issues---such as global warming---and instead simply believe what is tremendously convenient to their worldview are being will-fully ignorant.
I understand that traditional religion doesn't consider hatred, intolerance or will-full ignorance as being immoral. But I think that if people of good will pushed ordinary folks on the issue, we'd find a great many citizens do think of them that way. The problem is, that most liberals are so committed to the language of moral relativism that they refuse to use this, the strongest weapon in their arsenal.
The second issue that comes to mind in this debate is the way bigoted people seem to be manifesting some sort of outrage against their loss of a certain type of privilege. The problem is that if you were a white, middle-class, heterosexual, Christian, male, you used to be "on top of the heap". This meant that you were the last laid off, the first hired, people laughed at your jokes even if they weren't funny, and you could force other people to adhere to a code of behaviour that you believed in even if it made no sense to them. Now things are a lot more egalitarian. And you know what? A lot of people don't particularly want there to be prayer in school because they are either atheist or non-Christians. People like Perry (or the Republican primary voters he is trying to suck up to in the above advertisement) don't like losing this privilege. Most of them are too insensitive to understand that there are people out their that don't want prayer in schools or discrimination against gays, others just don't care because they are right and those other people are wrong.
I think we need to understand how tremendously awful the world must seem to these people. Younger people often forget this stuff, but at the advanced age of 52, I can remember when blacks were still getting routinely lynched in the American South for being "uppity", the police in Toronto were still arresting gays for being "found ins" at bath houses, my sister was flat out told that she couldn't enroll in a horticultural schools "because they don't allow women to take any of the courses", abortion was illegal, etc. For the older, tea-party types that are so important to the Republican and Conservative parties, it must seem like the world has been taken over by Martians.
Understanding where these people are coming from is not the same thing as accepting their behaviour, though. We simply cannot allow these people to damage our society the way that they have been doing. What needs to be done, therefore, is the creation of a public discussion that changes the "terms of discussion" so they no longer get to wrap themselves in the mantle of "morality". People need to stand up to these folks and use their own language.
The above Youtube parody is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, it can easily be dismissed as being "sacrilegious" by anyone who refuses to listen to what the actor is really saying. I do think, though, that people like Rick Perry and his supporters need to be "carpet bombed" by people who tell them that they don't think that picking one specific quote from the Old Testament then using it to preach hatred and discrimination really fits in with the over-all message of Christ as expressed in the New Testament.
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